2026-10-27 20:56 UTC
People who use assistive technologies, such as a screenreader or speech-recognition software, need to know the names of interactive elements on the web. Otherwise they may not be able to recognise the thing they’re dealing with, and so be unable to interact with it.
Which means we, as authors, need to give things meaningful accessible names. How does this happen?
#a11y #accessibility
Replies (1)
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@se_davidobrien@mastodon.scot 2026-10-27 20:57
Browsers (and, through them, assistive technologies) get accessibility information through something called the accessibility tree. This is a kind of stripped-down version of the Document Object Model (DOM), a representation of the web page that browsers use to render the page. While the DOM contains everything needed to render the page, the accessibility tree doesn’t need to know about things like styles, colours, fonts, and shapes. Instead, it focuses on 4 things: description role state name